Human 2.0

We’re on the brink of creating radically smarter, healthier and stronger versions of ourselves.

smart watch

Since our ancestors first picked up a club, we have always used “technology” to enhance our natural capabilities. Today it is all around us – from our cars and aeroplanes to our smartphones and smartwatches. What is the next step?

Will we, for instance, be answering calls from friends while simultaneously sending real-time health data to our doctors via an implanted super-smartphone? It might sound outlandish but a survey by the World Economic Forum predicts that the first implantable mobile phone will be available commercially by 2023.

Or will we be unlocking our cars and houses with a finger-point, and tracking body processes with unique smart tattoos?

MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research clearly think so. They have jointly created DuoSkin, a simple customisable smart tattoo fabrication process that can be used as a basis to create personalised on-skin wearables.

With their research available for all to experiment with, the DuoSkin team hopes others will develop fashionable smart tattoos that can sense touch input, display output and wirelessly communicate.

As such technology develops, in the not too distant future we will be able to wear and implant technologies that supersize the capabilities of human beings.

This is one of the aims of transhumanism – a movement that hopes to achieve radical human enhancement - be it intellectual, physical or psychological - through emerging technologies.

Once a niche activity that dealt with futuristic improbable sci-fi-like concepts, transhumanism is now becoming a reality.

the enhanced human

Assistive to enhancing tech

The initial aim of many of these technologies is to assist day-to-day lives of those with disabilities.

For example, Ted Berger from the University of Southern California has developed the world’s first artificial hippocampus, essentially offering the tantalising possibility of implanting a chip to combat the memory loss that comes with Alzheimer’s, stroke and brain injury.

"We’re testing it on humans now, and getting good results,” he revealed in a recent interview. The memory chip could well be applied to the general population to enhance recall.

Elsewhere, transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) has been explored to treat everything from back pain to the effects of Parkinson’s disease and even learning disabilities.

The treatment may also effectively zap anyone’s brain into action. Two studies by scientists at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio suggest that tDCS can be used to improve multi-tasking and significantly speed up the brains of people in high-pressure environments, like drone pilots and snipers, working twice as well and three times as long as caffeine, according to their results.

Of course, the brain is only half the story – huge progress is being made in technologies that enhance physical function as well.

The power of novel assistive devices was on display at the recent Cybathlon event in Switzerland. Negotiating obstacle courses consisting of a number of daily tasks – ranging from hanging clothes to going up and down steps – disabled athletes raced with powered arm and leg prostheses, robotic exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs. One US team used functional electrical stimulation (FES) implants to activate the leg muscles of paralysed “pilots” so that they could ride a bike.

Progress is also being made within the body, with augmented senses and artificial internal organs at various stages of development. Cochlear implants, bionic eyes like the Argus II retinal prosthesis and “feeling” hands like the world-first experimental system recently trialled in amputee Igor Spetic by researchers at Case Western Reserve University can restore some sensations that were thought to be irreparably lost in patients. Meanwhile, artificial kidneys, hearts, legs and tracheas can replace their damaged natural counterparts, with livers and lungs around the corner.

artifical hippocampus
computer chip

Ethics and risks

It's clear that many of the technologies tranhumanists are investigating offer huge potential.  

Yet such opportunities also come with risks, and if the innovations emerging from our ever-increasing understanding of the brain and body make you feel slightly uncomfortable, you are not alone.

Johann Roduit at the Bioethics Institute in the University of Zurich believes that new biomedical technologies aimed at altering and improving human beings could lead us to questioning the very essence of what it means to be human.

“We are here at the blurry line between the human, the animal, the sub-human, the post-human, the trans-human – so there’s a danger of dehumanisation, or of dehumanising a group that would (or not) use such enhancement. This has to be considered carefully.” 

About

Mega

Mega seeks to energise and enrich the debate over how to create a better-functioning economy and society.

Megatrends are the powerful socio-economic, environmental and technological forces that shape our planet. The digitisation of the economy, the rapid expansion of cities and the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources are just some of the structural trends transforming the way countries are governed, companies are run and people live their lives.

Photo of Mega